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This interview was conducted in two places dear to Malcolm Cowley, and which suggest the two main areas of his literary life. One conversation took place in the Harvard Club's Card Room, a cubbyhole in the New York club's upstairs warrens. Cowley often lunches at the club on the days when he comes into New York from his Connecticut home to perform his editing duties at Viking Press. A second talk held at Cowley's Connecticut home, where he is freer to do his own writing. Cowley's manner is brisk, his voice hearty. He wears a hearing aid, but that is his only visible concession to his years.

Thomas H. Guinzburg, who was Cowley's former publisher and employer at the Viking Press, wrote the following upon reading this interview: “ . . . fellow readers will gain the strong impression Cowley is determined to resist the constant invasions of his time. Do not believe him. Malcolm has always given ample time to any of us who were perceptive enough to seek it, frequently delaying his own more valuable projects in the process. Cowley missed the golden payday when editors suddenly became stars and found themselves negotiating their names onto book jackets and title pages. Nor did he ever adopt the 'New York' scene. He and his wife, Muriel, continue to live and work in Sherman, Connecticut, and from his one-man assembly line there continues to pour out our most accurate impressions of the life and times of American twentieth-century writing and publishing.”

 

INTERVIEWERS

How would you compare the lot of writers today with when you started?

COWLEY

In many ways things are easier now for writers. Sixty years ago there were no such things as writing fellowships; there were no Guggenheims . . . very few prizes. There were almost no teaching posts for writers. So the would-be writers came to New York and tried to get a job on a newspaper. Usually they ended up in an advertising agency, or they starved in the Village. Free-lance work was paid for at the rate of about a penny a word for reviews. The New Republic and The Dial paid two cents; that was high, and besides, you were always glad to be printed in those magazines.

The only chance for higher pay was with fiction, in the glossies. These had enormous circulations for that time, and they were paying good rates for fiction. The Saturday Evening Post went up to $4,000 per story with F. Scott Fitzgerald, and I don't think that was absolutely their top rate. A couple of other writers earned up to $50,000 every year writing short stories. Fiction was the field and remained so until the disappearance of the family magazine in the thirties and forties, one after the other going, until now it is the devil's own job to get fiction published, even for people who are very good at it. But still, by and large, the writer has an easier time of it than a few decades ago.

INTERVIEWERS

What about the poets?

COWLEY

There's been an enormous change. As late as 1930 there were only a few men and women who supported themselves as poets. One was Robert Frost and another was Oscar Hammerstein II. We had great respect for e.e. cummings because he lived as a poet, but even he got a little money from his mother. T. S. Eliot was a bank clerk, and then worked with Faber & Faber, the publishers. Robert Frost managed to support himself after North of Boston by readings, and by lecturing at universities. He rather blazed a trail in that respect. Now, a lot of poets are poets primarily. Many of them may teach or read their poetry to keep up, but probably two or three hundred people in the United States if asked their trade would say “poet.”

INTERVIEWERS

Do you regret not having concentrated more fully on your poetry?

COWLEY

Yes, I have regretted it very much. The shift, for me, was the essential middle-class feeling that I had to support myself.

INTERVIEWERS

What were you paid for Blue Juniata?

COWLEY

I got an advance of $125 and no further payments.

INTERVIEWERS

That was why you didn't go on?

COWLEY

I wanted to go on writing poetry, but I always had the feeling that I couldn't write any poem that didn't come to me. I didn't say to myself, “Go spend two hours and write a poem.” Perhaps I should have. Of course, if I'd had a few more dollars I would have written more poetry. Book reviewing didn't help. Odd: being an editor didn't interfere with my writing; it was being an editor and a book reviewer. You find that you put everything you've got into anything you write. There may not be so much left over.

INTERVIEWERS

There are many excuses for not writing.

COWLEY

Pipes are one of the best. I can use one even to keep from talking. And there's always a letter to be written. One of the great penalties of having been around for a long time is that there is hardly a genuine letter in the mail I receive. It's rare that one of my letters isn't a request for information about somebody on whom the requester is doing a dissertation. Jesus! Well, at least I don't have Edmund Wilson's great arrogance of sending back a printed card saying that he won't do it. I do reply. I generally refer them to other sources.

INTERVIEWERS

You're probably considered a soft touch.

COWLEY

I keep hoping I'll be compensated in some way. Once I wrote a piece that tried to sum up the joys and vexations of being eighty, but I left out one of the worst vexations— which is to become a national scholarly resource. I never expected to become a national scholarly resource—but you can't escape the destiny of your dotage. Simply by having outlived your great contemporaries, you find that you have a field all to yourself; or if you don't have a field, at least you have a stable in one corner of the field. Hundreds of scholars then come into the field who are writing dissertations, monographs, biographies—all sorts of things—and for each one they want to have a little reinforcement, a little supplement; they want to have a word straight from the horse's mouth. So they come to me and say, “Well, you are the horse—won't you please share your memories? Won't you please answer this little questionnaire of five single-spaced typed pages?” or, “Won't you let us put your memories on tape?” There is no enrichment from this sort of thing. Not one of them thinks of filling the horse's feed-box with oats or of putting a little hay in the manger. They assume, I guess, that a horse can just forage for himself—if he has time; certainly nobody gives him an offer to earn an easy living by putting himself out to stud.